• Born Nathaniel Hathorne July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864
  • Born to Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne in Salem, MA
  • Two sisters
  • A descendant of John Hathorne a judge during the Witchcraft Trials in Salem
  • His father died when he was four
  • Before he attended collge the family moved in with his uncles in Maine
  • Attended Bowdion College in Brunswick, Maine in 1821
  • After college he changed his last name from Hathorne to Hawthorne trying to dissociate himself from John Hathorne, his grandfather
  • He attended college with a famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future American President Franklin Pierce who he wrote a biography on
  • Married painter and fellow transcendentalist Sophia Peabody
  • They settled in the heart of Transcendentalist country Concorde, Massachusetts, living in the ‘The Old Manse’
  • They had 3 daughters: Una, Rose, Julian

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a fantastic writer, but he did not start off like that. His first couple of short stories were not a great success. He was not expecting much response from the public. Hawthorne's works are about romanticism, but mostly dark romantiscism. Dark romanticism talks about cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity. His four most succesful novels were written between 1850 and 1860: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance(1852) and The Marble Faun (1860).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne#Early_life
http://kirjasto.sci.fi/hawthorn.htm
http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/
http://www.gradesaver.com/author/hawthorne/